Everything for Everyone

Why must the working class, which produces the wealth, constantly fight for sufficient wages to maintain a decent standard of living? Why is there poverty in the midst of plenty? Why must we live in out-dated and run-down buildings when there is enough material and skilled labour to construct decent homes for everyone?

The capitalist class manipulate the means of production to serve their selfish profit interests. They have converted the means for potential plenty into a monstrous exploitative mechanism creating scarcity, terrible depressions, starvation wages, poverty, wars. Capitalism has turned the world into a mad-house of conflicting economic rivalries, state boundaries, tariff walls, culminating in military conflicts.

The only “management” truly capable of organising and administrating industry for full and efficient production and for the needs of the people are the workers themselves. Socialist planning, on the other hand, begins with the expropriation of capitalist property, the expansion of the productive machinery, and the raising of the standard of living. The whole possibility for socialism rests on the feasibility of enormously increasing the productivity of world society. If economic plenty is unrealisable it follows that socialism is not inevitable. Socialists have determined how this can be done through the efficient utilisation of present resources, transport and factories, the elimination of unemployment, the cessation of war, the ending of economic chaos through rational planning and the early expansion of the productive system through the intensive application of science. Many surveys have been made of the possibilities of plenty; the most modest revealing grandiose perspectives if no more were done than to run the existing machines at full capacity. So long as scarcity prevails, ruthless struggle for the major share endures. When scarcity disappears, however, then rational planning of world society not only becomes feasible, but inevitable. A planned socialist economy would rapidly guarantee a rising standard of living on the basis of an abundance of goods produced in the interests of the many and not for the profit of the few.

The Socialist Party does not hold that our fellow-workers can be delivered from poverty, unemployment, degradation, war, by any reform of the capitalist system under which we live. That system must be abolished, wage slavery must be done away with altogether. The workers must own and control the machinery of production. As for curing the ills of the workers by reforming capitalism, we have lived through years of Labour Party governments and you know only too well what that has got us. The gains we have made have been eroded away as the Welfare State and the social services are cut back. During the recession the bail-outs were provided not for the workers, but for the capitalist class. There is always some one who promises to fix things. Isn’t it about time that the workers realised that it does not make any difference how well-meaning these capitalist saviours may be in offering salvation, there is no way out under capitalism? Palliatives has not ended the system of want amidst plenty.

Under capitalism the general trend is toward greater misery for the workers. Capitalists make their profits by paying the worker in wages a smaller value than he creates by labouring. The capitalist thus gets what Marx calls surplus value. It is the only way profit can be created. Under modern conditions expensive plants and equipment are increased, but the work is done with fewer workers. Thus they must be exploited ever more fiercely in order that surplus value – profit – may be squeezed out of their labour, the only possible source of profit. Capitalism will forever force living standards lower and again lower. Things could be better. Plenty and security might be had. But first workers must become convinced that capitalism cannot be reformed and that it must be abolished. They also must reject the idea that we can gradually replace capitalism with socialism though a policy of ameliorative reforms. The gradualism idea of running a capitalist and a socialist, a profit and non-profit, system side by side is absurd. It is like trying to ride on two horses going in opposite directions. 

The capitalist system remains under all these “socialist housing schemes” etc. and the crisis is not resolved; it gets worse. There was a time when capitalism was able to make concessions to the workers, better the standard of living, without cutting into profits which brought certain results. Now capitalism maintains itself only by taking away concessions – wage rates, welfare benefits, etc. – which it once gave. Capitalism must drive the standard of living lower all the time. There is only one solution and it is no more quack remedies offered such as wage indexation, tax indexation, designed to hoodwink the people.